Highway 13 cuts through Saskatchewan like a scar, a straight shot across a land that’s as flat as a dead man’s EKG. It’s a place where the sky is bigger than anything else, stretching out forever, a cruel joke for anyone looking for a way out. You drive down this highway and all you see are the skeletons of what used to be—abandoned farms, leaning barns, and towns that barely qualify as a dot on the map.

The buildings are old and tired, beaten down by wind and time. Paint flakes off in big, ugly patches, exposing the gray wood beneath. Roofs sag like the shoulders of men who’ve seen too much. There’s a farmhouse, its windows busted out, curtains flapping like ghosts trying to get free. The yard is choked with weeds, a rusty swing set creaking in the wind, like it’s still trying to remember the laughter of kids who left a long time ago.

Further down the road, there’s a grain elevator, a hulking mass of rusted metal, wood and silence. Once, it was the heartbeat of the town, filled with the hopes of farmers who thought they could wrestle a living from the dirt. Now it just looms over everything, a tombstone for dreams that didn’t make it. The fields around it stretch out in every direction, empty, a reminder that not even the land wants to stick around anymore.

Every so often, you pass a church, its steeple crooked, the bell long gone. No one goes there anymore, not even God. It’s all just empty. Not a kind of empty that can be filled, but the kind that grows, spreading out, swallowing up everything it touches.

This stretch of highway isn’t for the living. It’s for the ghosts of what used to be, a reminder that time moves on even when you can’t. The road keeps going, straight and unbending, like it’s daring you to keep driving. And maybe you do, because you don’t have a choice, because there’s nothing else to do but keep moving forward, even if there’s nowhere left to go.